sound patrol 5-5-05

Moving from fear to forgiveness

Since releasing his first
cassette in 1991, John Darnielle, a singer/songwriter who records as the
Mountain Goats, has authored more than 400 songs, most of which are better
than any number of songs you’re likely to hear. Don’t beat
yourself up for overlooking his brilliance, though. For more than a decade,
Darnielle hid his light under the requisite indie-rock bushel, yelping into
boom boxes, fetishizing tape hiss, and cultivating a small but insanely
devoted following of fellow freaks. (He also inadvertently made the world
safe for Conor Oberst, but we won’t hold that against him.) However,
beginning with 2002’s Tallahassee, his first outing for the UK-based 4AD label, Darnielle has
been moving away from this defiantly lo-fi aesthetic toward something that,
if not exactly Clear Channel-friendly, involves recording at actual studios
with actual musicians and actual engineers; whether this concession will
endear him to mainstream music fans remains to be seen, but it certainly
removes the biggest obstacle.

The Sunset Tree, the
follow-up to last year’s excellent We
Shall All Be Healed, also marks the continuation
of his recent autobiographical leanings. Although Darnielle once disdained
the reductive narcissism of confessional singer/songwriters — those
embarrassingly earnest soul-barers for whom the first-person pronoun is an
end in itself — he has come to embrace the creative possibilities in
his own life story. The Sunset TreeÂ is dedicated both to Darnielle’s late stepfather
and to survivors of abuse, a connection that becomes uncomfortably obvious
as the song cycle unfolds. If the prospect of 13 songs about suffering at
the hands of a sadistic patriarch fills you with dread, you’re not
alone: Child abuse, after all, is not only depressing but also depressingly
commonplace. Every victim’s pain is special and important and
pitiable, but no one, unfortunately, wants to hear about it.

The 13 songs follow a nonlinear but emotionally
accurate trajectory, depicting the narrator’s movement from fear and
rage to various forms of escapism and, finally, in the gorgeous closing
diptych, to a kind of forgiveness. On the delicate “Love Love
Love,” Darnielle somehow ties together Raskolnikov, Kurt Cobain, and
the New Testament, distilling all of the allusions into a message
that’s both perfectly obvious and unassailably true: “Some
things you’ll do for money, some you’ll do for fun/But the
things you do for love are going to come back to you one by one.”
Despite its horrific subject matter, The Sunset
TreeÂ is an act of love. Let’s hope it
comes back to him.